Tuesday, September 2, 2014

I finished "Don't call me kitten!" a little while ago. My highly valued test readers and editors have given it their thumbs up. So what am I waiting on? Well there is a move afoot to immortalise my beloved partner's Laverda Jota on the front cover. The main character of this book, Helena, needed a bike. At first I thought her bike was going to be a Vincent Black Shadow on a Norton Featherbed frame but as there are not a lot of those around where I live and I needed a unique copyright free photo I was in a bit of a quandry. It was then my partner suggested the Laverda. The very original full racing version is bright orange and goes so fast that if you are a pillion passenger on the back it damn near pins your ears back. Being race worthy it is rather temperamental. It needs a full charge in its battery, the right ocatane fuel and the right spark plugs for the conditions you want to ride it in. It has been our pride and joy for many years but it is a younger person's bike and it is in need of restoration. Before we part with it we want to put it on the cover of book 4. To do that my partner needs to get it road worthy, as well a presentable for sale. Then we'll find a nice location for the photo shoot.

In the meantime I've had a rare form of shingles back in May. Throughout the Australian winter we've been immersed in house building as we extend our small log cabin retirement home to include a deck, a new main bedroom, bathroom (with bath - yay!) and lounge room. In the middle of all that my two day a week paying job is going through restructuring and cutbacks. My intuition is telling me its time to pull out my resume, do a new business card and go hunting some casual work to tide me over until I'm legally entitled to draw on my superannuation. It's a balancing act between working enough to pay the bills and having enough time to write, garden and meditate.

Book five is in progress and I've given it a working title of "Don't label me." This will be mainly Hideo and Sathi's story but as usual there will be plenty of sub plots building on the lives of those in Boswell. I'm still fleshing out the plot for it but it is starting to come together.

And...I've decided Simon needs a cookbook which a certain unscrupulous journalist will copy. This will include many of the recipes that have been mentioned in the novels plus others. I'm putting it together as much for my own reference as well as those interested in the ancient Sattvic diet and its principles. I'm particularly interested in adapting the diet to the colder and more temperate climates. The original was designed for the tropics. I thought it would be better if the bulk of the ingredients used could be grown in Boswell.

Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Since Slideshare closed down its Slidecast service (that allowed you to sync audio with a presentation). I first moved the whole of the "Infinity of Space" meditation to myPlick and now the audio only, as an mp3 file, to Audioboo https://audioboo.fm/boos/2443889-an-infinitiy-of-space-a-meditation. The myplick version is just a straight overlay of sound over the pdf I downloaded from Slideshare. I haven't fiddled yet to see if you can control where slides change but on this one it doesn't really matter as it is really one to do with your eyes closed anyway.